Ask someone to name an Atlanta tech company and they’ll probably say Mailchimp. Or Calendly. Or Salesloft. Look a little further and you’ll find OneTrust, Greenlight, Terminus. Different products, different categories, but a lot of them share the same thing underneath: they’re built for small businesses and small teams, not enterprise buying committees.
That’s not an accident. Atlanta’s SaaS scene grew up around a different kind of customer than Silicon Valley’s did. And it means the research here is genuinely different too, whether the teams building these products have thought about it that way or not.
Enterprise research and small-business research aren’t the same skill, even though they look identical on a resume.
Enterprise software gets bought by a group of people. There’s a champion, a budget owner, an IT person, sometimes a lawyer. Research for that world is mostly about figuring out who needs to be convinced, and in what order.
Small business software gets bought by one person, usually the same person who’ll use it, set it up, and cancel it the second it feels confusing. There’s no champion to win over. There’s no IT department smoothing anything out. The question isn’t “who needs to sign off,” it’s “will this one person, alone, figure out in fifteen minutes that this thing is worth their time.”
Those are two different problems. A method that works great for one can quietly fail for the other, and it won’t look like failure. It’ll look like clean, tidy data that just happens to answer the wrong question.
I’ve seen this from both sides. Twelve years at Sage, working on small business accounting software, taught me what “small business customer” actually means day to day: less time, less patience, and almost no tolerance for anything that doesn’t pay off right away. Later, working with Mailchimp on a product built specifically for small business owners, I saw the exact same thing hold true in a completely different category.
The teams that get this wrong usually aren’t doing bad research. They’re doing research built for a big enterprise deal and pointing it at a small business problem instead. Same structured interviews, same rounds of validation, same process that would be exactly right if a six-figure contract were on the line, aimed at a product a small business owner might give up on after one confusing setup screen. The research is careful. It’s just not answering a question anyone who actually buys the product is asking.
If you’re building for who Atlanta actually sells to, not just where the office happens to be, the research needs to match that. That means fewer people to interview and more time just watching a small business owner try to get something useful out of the product in the first few minutes. It means paying attention to how much annoyance someone will actually put up with, not just whether a feature works on paper. And it means being honest that matching a big competitor feature for feature (a whole separate problem on its own) usually matters a lot less than solving the one thing this person actually needed solved today.
Atlanta didn’t build Silicon Valley’s kind of software. It built something else. It deserves research that actually fits it.